13 Autumns

I'm writing this in Polruan, in South Cornwall after being in London over Christmas, [although I couldn't get any internet access while I was there anyway, so I've had to wait til I'm back in Brighton to post it anyway...]. I had grand plans for my running in London but of course they didn't go anywhere because my ability to live up to my grand plans is very much in question. One of my plans was to run on most of the available days, but I only ended up running one time on Boxing Day, having got back from my sister's. I had also planned on doing somewhere along the lines of 8 miles by following a route to where I went to school and back. In the end, the snow still hadn't melted properly and there were too many icy patches in the days before Christmas, and the day that I would have run that route – being Christmas Eve – I spent instead chiselling a hole in a door to fit a new lock at my mum's place. In addition to this, and in my defence, I did do the walk back from Dulwich (i.e. half of my proposed run) at half midnight or so on the night of the 23rd/24th having had a lift back from Balham, and I was pretty tired by the time I got back.

What I did manage to do, on Boxing Day, was a 40 minute run around Brockley and its environs, the land of my adolescence and as such a very special placed populated by the imaginings of a febrile mind overstocked on Hammer Horror films, Cradle of Filth and White Wolf games, which is to say: surely unrecognisable from the state of my mind currently, oh yes.

Starting from my mum's I ran out and pretty much directly towards Brockley Rise, missing Brockley Cross because there's nothing exciting there except a lumber yard and some dodgy traffic that I didn't feel like contending with. The first landmark I reached was the video shop that I used to go to, which is now apparently a betting shop. This made me sad, as the place was great for a number of reasons, but I can't claim that I'm a great supporter of video shops anymore so I'm not going to complain.

When I lived there however, it was a great shop, so let me list the reasons I loved it. First, there was the anime section that they had before it was cool to have an anime section. It wasn't massive, but it was there, and it had Dominion Tank Police, which is a great series. Second, they used to rent films to me quite a long time before I should have been able to rent them. In one of my least clever acts, and with all the tact and forethought for which the adolescent mind is famed, when I was 16 or 17 and looking for a job, I stupidly applied there. They gave my CV straight back to me and basically told me that they would pretend that I had never given it to them in the first place. I left feeling very foolish. Thirdly, I had one of my first crushes on a woman who worked there. In a classic manoeuvre I only actually developed the crush after she (sort of) asked my cousin out because he was wearing a pentacle and it turned out she was a Wiccan, except that he wasn't and wasn't that interested anyway. I then read up on Wicca, but never got to put my knowledge to any use because I was a spotty teenager and that automatically (and quite rightly) ruled me out as a potential suitor.

However, even after I no longer had a crush on her, the idea that there was a coven of witches active in Brockley made me quite happy and became part of my personal pantheon of the supernatural in South East London.

After leaving behind the no-longer-video-shop the next thing to pass was Ladywell cemetery, which I ran around the perimeter of as my way of heading back homewards. Going through Ladywell cemetery was my official coming-home-from-school shortcut-through-the-graveyard (if you've watched any Buffy, or probably any horror films at all you'll know what I mean), except that I had to get off the first bus two stops late and not get the second bus for it to be in any way a shortcut which again shows the interesting contortions of the mind of the teenage goth when in search of darkness.

Up from the cemetery the route then took in the main event, the nexus of my imaginary world – Hilly Fields (a field on a hill, in case you were wondering, with a pretty good view over London) This is where I used to come up walking whenever I wanted to get out of the house, and as far as I was concerned was the hub of spiritual activity in South London. I reckoned there was a pack of werewolves up there, the aforementioned coven of witches and a number of ley lines crossing as well for good measure. (There was a vampire living in a church just down the hill – I passed it later in my run – but he was barred from the hill by the power of the witches, natch.)

Hilly Fields is amazing for another reason, quite beyond the contents of my own mind. It turns out that I'm not the only one with bizarre ideas about the paranormal supremacy of Brockley, as the local residents group had their own ideas. For the Millenium celebrations, they decided that what we needed was our very own stone circle. So one got commissioned and built – God knows who paid for it, it must have taken a hell of a lot bake sales (they probably did tell us in the article in Brocsoc News about it, but I don't remember that bit). It's epic; apparently it can be used a sundial if you stand in the correct spot but the thing that I always noticed was that the two tall stones line up perfectly with the old Citibank building in Lewisham. If you go there on a Saturday people use the stones to play football. I love Lewisham. Anyway, I ran past that too – I tried to take a photo but it was too dark. And then I ran down the hill back to my Mum's for pasta and Wallander on the telly. All in all it was a rather paltry 3 miles. Oh dear.

I have been running in Polruan and I shall report more on that soon.